Carlisle United manager Paul Simpson has accepted part of the responsibility for his side’s Papa John’s Trophy exit at Barrow.
He said that he’d made mistakes in his preparations for the game which the Blues lost 2-0 to go out of the competition.
At the same time he was disappointed that the level of performance had dropped so much from Saturday’s fine effort to beat Doncaster.
“Some people might be pleased we are out of the competition but not me. I wanted to win and go through,” said Simpson.
The manager explained: “We just have to dust ourselves down and prepare well for what is a good game against Leyton Orient on Saturday.
“Corey was struggling from the week-end but he said he thought he’d be ok. His ankle was sore and stiff, and I made a stupid decision to play him, so that one is my fault.
“We have to move on, we’ve just got to get on with it and get ourselves ready for the weekend.
“I’ve made a mistake there with Corey, I shouldn’t have played him. But you have these criteria you have to fill to put a team out – who played on Saturday, who’s going to play at the week-end, are they from a Cat One academy, all sorts of things.”
Simpson had planned to play Ben Barclay but revealed a training ground injury ruled him out.
“I had to change the team late on Monday because Ben was going to start, but in one of the last set-plays we practiced in training he went up to head a ball, landed awkwardly and jarred his ankle again.
“It’s the same injury, but we don’t know how bad it is yet.
“We’re going to send him for a scan. I don’t honestly believe it’s as bad as last time. It certainly didn’t seem that way.”
Adding to Carlisle’s problems on the night striker Jack Stretton had to retire with an ankle injury.
“That’s a big disappointment for us. He’s gone over with absolutely nobody near him and he’s jarred his ankle as well.
“We need to see how he is for the weekend.
“It was one of those where there was nobody around him as he just put his studs in the ground and went over. There’s a bit of swelling there now so we’ll see how it settles and what it looks like.
“These are strange ones now, players rolling ankles, that’s probably four of them. We’re having a little bit of a bad time with them. As we get somebody really flying, as we did with Jack, he goes and does that. We just have to wait and see,” said Simpson.
